


more than a feeling

by palisadespalisades



Category: IT (2, IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Slow Burn, also cw for serophobia, and being gay, and it certainly is a time, but it's about eddie, cw for a fairly liberal use of homophobic slurs, eddie has a mac-level multi-year breakdown over being Gay, i'd die for eddie kaspbrak so uh jot that down, it's definitely reddie-heavy in content, like super slow, they are definitely being tossed around here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-01-29 01:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12620432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palisadespalisades/pseuds/palisadespalisades
Summary: Eddie's a lot of things, but he's no queer.(A look at growing up gay in the 90s.)





	more than a feeling

**Author's Note:**

> title from boston's self-titled album
> 
> *this is a permanently unfinished work :( sorry!

When Bev left for Portland, the rest of the Losers sent her letters biweekly.

They would all jam their letters into one manila envelope, to save on postage, and Ben mailed them off to her. They would await her return letters eagerly, jammed into the same beaten envelope and sent back with stickers pressed against the flap, barely held together. After everything happened, they needed her just as much as they needed each other — probably more, all things considered. Bev was smart in a way the boys just didn’t know how to be; the way Mike was almost, but she was a little ahead of him. Her wisdom came easily. His would take a little more time. They all missed her fiercely, for who she was, and what she offered, too. After the summer ended, Stan and Mike didn’t write as much. They still did, but they didn’t need to; Mike looked to Beverly for a peer, but it didn’t take him long to understand that his gut sense was just as keenly sharp as her heart, and at some point, Stan realized that he just didn’t have as much to say — their friendship was much richer the more infrequently they met. He didn’t _need_ as much as the rest of them did (and he was learning that he could lean on Mike, too, and that was a revelation Bev had the good sense to push.)

The rest of them still needed her. They weren’t there yet.

Bill’s letters were where the mask came off. They were where he was endlessly brave, the confident, self-assured leader they needed him to be, and a thirteen-year-old boy, just as scared as the rest, all at once. He told her about his nightmares — Georgie with his galoshes, sloshing in the basement. _It_ , lurking just beneath the surface, breathing bubbles from down below. He wrote her when he was drowning, too.

Ben wrote her to be brave. His letters were the longest by far — stories intertwined with poems and book clippings, sketches of parts of Derry only he could make her miss. He didn’t need to lean on Bev; instead, he offered her a shoulder to rest her weariness on. Ben was _good_ , and he loved her just because he did, not because he needed from her. Bill was what was supposed to happen, but Ben was what was right.

Richie wrote her because he could never stop talking, and he never passed up an opportunity to chatter someone else’s ear off, even if it was with a pen and paper. His scrawls were covered in doodles, half-illegible and cherished dearly. Richie wrote Bev because even if he never said anything about them, he knew she understood, she knew what it was like. He didn’t need to paint a picture of the beer cans piled up in the recycling bin, his mother passed out on the couch, his father the same in some motel across town, for her to see them — for her to see him.

Eddie wrote her because she _got it_.

He didn’t realize that this was why he wrote her — not at first, not when his letters were long, uncomfortable; stiff accounts detailing every single interaction that took place the since the last one he sent. He kept accounts in his head, filed away for her, because he figured she wouldn’t want to miss a thing, and that’s the only thing that held them together at first. Bev was an empath, though, reading between the lines and asking the questions Eddie was asking her to without knowing it, and that’s when he realized she understood. Looking back, he knew that understanding first came months before, when she sheared off most of her hair, and it just took longer for his head to pull the pieces all together. She understood what he meant when he said he _had_ to do something. The rest of the guys never got it — never understood Eddie’s paranoia, how these ideas creeped into his headspace and rattled around until it was all he could think about. They figured that once he realized he was in gazebos, he would stop worrying so much — but fear was like breathing. It was an automatic compulsion, that _just happened_ when he didn’t think about it and overwhelmed him when he did.

And Eddie was afraid of everything, and he was even more afraid, maybe, because he was realizing it wasn’t _rational_. He’d read Sybil, and the DSM, and watched all the movies he could find at the rental place, anything that screamed (or whispered) _crazy_ , but his crazy wasn’t like in the movies. It wasn’t voices. It was him. He was telling himself to do all these things — to walk into the road, to throw himself out the window. He was the voice that wanted to die but was scared so badly of getting hurt — who woke up in the middle of the night _shaking_ because he couldn’t remember if it was Sunday or Monday, and he didn’t know if he set his alarm. He always did. It wasn’t rational. None of it was.

Fear overwhelmed him, ate him up, and he couldn’t live like that — didn’t want the other Losers to know what kind of crazy he was when he had to see them every day, see them getting better, see them letting go. When they all slept over at Ben’s house, he didn’t know how to cope with being the only one awake at 3am, taking a useless puff of a fake-inhaler, locked in the bathroom, trying to breath. He didn’t want them to know how crazy he was, even though they almost certainly did. So, he didn’t tell them — he told Bev, and she _got it_.

She got a lot of things he was afraid people in Derry wouldn’t.

Before Georgie disappeared, there was a guy who went missing — Adrian Mellon. Eddie didn’t _know_ Adrian Mellon, but his name was imprinted in the back of Eddie’s mind for a long time, because Adrian Mellon was a _homosexual_. He was a _queer_ , and he got tossed off a bridge. He only found out about Adrian Mellon because he heard his mother let out a self-satisfied grunt when she read the article about his death, like, _yeah, that’s what happens to That Kind in Derry_. He didn’t fully understand why he became so obsessed with Adrian Mellon, going as far to clip the article out of the newspaper and keep it, and all the subsequent articles. He wasn’t creepy enough to stalk the guy’s boyfriend or whatever — but he’d considered it, more seriously than he should’ve. At first, he justified the obsession — he had a lot of excuses. After all, _queer_ followed him wherever he went. People had their suspicions, and Eddie couldn’t blame them. He was _delicate_. That’s what his mother always called him, and even when he found out his gazebos were gazebos, he didn’t get any bigger, or look any less delicate, and he could never really disentangle himself from his mother’s grasp. She’s always be painfully protective, a smothering, hysterical, co-dependent woman, even when she couldn’t force him into hospital beds or on bedrest. Mama’s boys, they were all _queers_ , anyways.

He was obsessed with Adrian Mellon because people thought _he_ was like _that_ , and he didn’t want to get murdered, too. He was reasonably afraid. It was understandable. He didn’t want to be mistaken for what Adrian was, and the newspaper clipping he kept in a tin sewing box in the back of his closet was a reminder to never let his eyes linger too long anywhere, lest people misunderstand that it was _completely innocent_.

After the summer, he realized that _It_ probably got Adrian Mellon. People had been thrown off that bridge before and survived, and when they never found a body — it just made sense. Everyone had their ghost, after that summer, and Adrian Mellon was Eddie’s. Everyone and their mother thought he was a homo, including _It_.

(He tried to forget what _It_ was. He told himself _It_ was just a leper. _It_ was just a fucking leper. _It_ was a leper that wanted his pills. _It_ didn’t offer him a blowjob.)

(And if _It_ did, it wasn’t sex with a _man_ Eddie was scared of, because that would never, ever, _ever_ cross his mind — it was sex in general. Sex was _germy_. Of course he’d be afraid.)

Adrian Mellon haunted him because _It_ got him. He wondered what could scare a homo to death. Was it women? Was it homophobes?

Was it other men?

Adrian Mellon lived in his head, even after Derry forgot about him. His grinning face, black and white in newsprint, lived the locker he pointedly never turned away from when he got changed for gym class, hiding away from the other boys. His name ran title billboard every time he walked across the bridge, trailing two paces behind his friends, staring straight through the concrete walkway. Eddie wasn’t the kind of crazy who heard voices, no, but he heard Adrian Mellon’s invented voice, swishy and effeminate, only shades lispier than his own, when bullies chased him down the street, screaming _fag_ and _queer_ , spitting _homo_ at his heels, echoing with a tone that Eddie could only read as _“They’re right, you know?”_

They weren’t. They couldn’t be. Eddie decided, at thirteen years old, that he’d kill himself if they were.

Being a homo wasn’t an option, for two reasons in particular. The first: if he was already being tortured like he was, it would only be worse if he was actually queer. He figured the bullying was something he'd grow out of, but Adrian Mellon was not a shrimpy teenage boy when he got thrown off a bridge. He was a grown man, with a job and a life. Eddie had always guessed that being accused of faggotry was something he'd outgrow, someday. He'd get a girlfriend, and they'd all realize that yeah, Eddie isn't a sissy. He's a dork, and a loser, but not a _sissy_. If he was actually gay... it would never end. The torment would never be over. The world changed, but Derry didn't, and sometimes, it felt like he'd never escape. The second? Fags were _dirty_. He’d seen stories on the news — about how all the gays in New York were dying. They were sick. His mother had told him about his friend that caught AIDS from a _hangnail_. Eddie knew as much about AIDS as any thirteen-year-old living in Derry possibly could, which meant his grasp on the subject was tenuous at best, but he knew it had something to do with sex, and thanks to Trashmouth Tozier, he knew more than enough about gay sex to make some guesses — gay sex was dirty, and it killed people. Eddie, more than not wanting to be a _fucking faggot tightass queer_ didn’t want to _die_.

But the thing with the way Eddie thought — when the thoughts started, nagging, angry thoughts like that — they bounced around in his head, and they never seemed to leave. _You’re gonna die_ turned into _you’re a fuckin’ faggot_ , and he didn’t know which was worse.

* * *

 Bev got things in a way the other Losers didn’t. She got things in the way _Derry_ didn’t. He told her about the thoughts — the ones that wouldn’t leave his head, that nagged him every waking moment and threw him out of sleep most nights too — and she didn’t think he was crazy. She was worried, but she didn’t think he was crazy. And, besides, after all they had been through, there was a certain threshold for acceptable craziness. Eddie thought she’d get that this was just a part of that craziness. That it wasn’t real. That it wasn’t really him.

It took him over a month to figure out how he’d tell her — they were mostly through the school year, and when he finally mailed out the letter, they were closer to summer break (and Bev’s coming summer visit) than to when Eddie had initially decided to tell her. The issue was no longer telling her at all, because he was certain he would, so much as it was figuring out how exactly he’d do it. He didn’t want to tell her he was gay, because he _wasn’t_ , and he didn’t want her to get the impression that he was just denying it, because he wasn’t. It was called an intrusive thought, and he was being intruded with not even thoughts of… homosexual sex, but thoughts of just _being gay_ , and that didn’t mean anything without the sex, anyways. He had no desire to think of the sex acts itself, and that was the thread of heterosexuality he was clinging to; he did not want to have sex with a man. It was just his head — screaming _I’mgayI’mgayI’mgay_ over and over and over, until Eddie was on the brink.

He figured that if he wanted help, it would be best if he told her exactly that. 

> _“Dear Bev,_
> 
> _I’m not a gay, but I think my brain is scared I am. I know I’m not, because I don’t want to have homo sex. Also: strap in, the rest of this letter isn’t going to get any better.”_

He got a letter back from Bev a week later, like clockwork. He only read the first line before he tore it up, tore up the envelope, and borrowed Richie’s lighter to burn it in the sewing box in the back of his closet, with the clippings about Adrian Mellon. He sat in that closet for an hour, puffing on his inhaler (that he _knew_ didn’t really do anything).

> _“Dear Eddie,_
> 
> _You know it’s okay, right? You don’t have to hide from me.”_

He didn’t send Bev any more letters, after that.


End file.
